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Soviet Steel – Heavy Infantry First Impressions

They’ve been a while coming, but they’re finally here; this week Warlord Games released preview blisters for the forthcoming Soviet Heavy Infantry. My blister packs have landed, and boy do they make a positive first impression.

The sculpts are crisp and surprisingly detailed. The poses for the heavy infantry are nice and whilst I’d have liked a way of denoting the NCO a little easier or the opportunity to easily swap heads, like other nations have had, there’s no denying that both Clockwork Goblin and Warlord have stuck firmly to the vision and theme for the Soviets in K47.

The Miniatures come in either two or three parts. The body of the miniature comes in a single piece with the opportunity to add either one or both arms depending upon the body in the pack.

Soviet Heavy Infantry – Front View

Soviet Heavy Infantry – Rear View

This allows us to build one of the models toting two dual weapon packs. Personally I’d have been happier if you had the option to buy a pack of three with two dual weapon packs or pack of three with one dual weapon packs to suit your preference. I am sure given the current pressure at Warlord at present, they’re just trying to get us models out to buy, the niggly options can come later. As you can see there’s plenty of detail on the rear of the models too. These will be fun to paint up and use.

The dual weapon pack arms are nicely detailed and have good contact points allowing you to easily attach the arms to the bodies. I still think that for robust gamers, pinning would be advisable, especially given the weight of these models. They certainly have a heftiness about them!

Soviet Heavy Infantry Dual Weapon Packs

Having seen Slammer Sammuels I was concerned a bit of scale creep in K47 and I was hoping that he was the exception rather than the rule. I was very relieved to see that this is the case. The heavy infantry feel about right when placed next to existing Warlord miniatures and match up well to other heavy infantry models that I’ve seen (and played against).

I think that the Soviet heavy infantry are perhaps the best available to any of the nations within K47. The anti tank munitions in their dual weapon packs are capable of dealing more than adequately with tough opponents thanks to their 18″ range and +2 Pen. Anyone daft enough to assault these bad boys will certainly not like the SMG munitions giving each weapon pack 3 shots at 6″ or in close combat. Yowzers! [Edit:] The 3 shots for the dual weapon packs is a typo in the original rules. Dual Weapon packs firing in SMG mode only get 2 shots per weapon pack. Still Pokey, just not quite as overwhelmingly so. The updated rules can be found in the FAQ/Errata document here.

The combination of Slow and the much reduced range of their weapons will mean (however) that these will need to be deployed aggressively or provided with a delivery vehicle. This will result in this unit representing a substantial element of your force. They will do the job for you, but to get maximum return on your investment you’ll want to ensure these hit the right targets and don’t get bogged down with cheap and largely dispensable troops or whittled away before they get a chance to do anything, thus reducing their efficacy.

If however, you manage to hit the right targets at the right time and have a little dice luck, well it’s sad times for whatever they hit, as James discovered in our game recently!